The Male Hustler Read online

  “It’s a good life . . .”

  Eldon

  “Most Johns are very timid. Maybe that’s not the word I want. Shy. Reticent. As if there’s a certain formula for making arrangements, for managing a pick-up. And they aren’t sure they have it down pat, and they don’t want to do anything wrong. Like an actor in a new play who doesn’t have his lines. I find myself acting as prompter. ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘Nice night for a change.’ ‘Yes, nice night, I was afraid it was going to rain.’ ‘So was I, but it doesn’t look like rain.’ ‘Oh, I’m so glad of that, because I would positively melt.’ ‘Uh-huh, I don’t like the rain much either.’ ‘Yes, that’s very interesting, certainly, but it is a trifle cold, don’t you think?’ ‘Cold, yes, sure is.’ ‘And it would be nice to be somewhere warmer.’ ‘Yes, sure would, wouldn’t it? Uh, why don’t we go somewhere and have a drink?’ ‘Yes, why don’t we, and I thought you’d never ask.’

  “Not quite like that, necessarily, but you get the general idea. The more unsure of themselves they are, the more tiresome they become, and when they’re simply too too tiresome I tell them in a nice way to fuck off. Or perhaps not in a nice way. It’s a very liberating thing, you know, to curl your lip at a total stranger and do things with your eyebrows and say ‘Oh, fuck off, will you?’ as bitchily as possible. One hates to be cruel, but there are times when it’s just so gratifying.

  “And, my dear, the reactions! Most often their faces fall apart and they slunk off in a state. Is that a word? Slunk? Well, it is now.

  “I remember one out-of-town dolt. ‘Fuck off,’ I told him. And he just fixed me with this stare of total disbelief. ‘Now hold on a minute,’ he said. ‘Listen, if I said anything the least bit out of line, I mean it wasn’t my intention. I’m a stranger here, I don’t want to do anything out of line.’

  “I imagine I said something to the effect that I just wanted him to go away and leave me alone. ‘Well, just so I know the score,’ he said. ‘I mean, the way you’re dressed and the way you talk and all. I mean, you’re a queer, right? A homosexual, am I right or am I right?’

  “‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I’m Marie of Roumania, and I’m aghast that you didn’t recognize me.’

  “‘Well, look, Marie,’ he said. I swear I’m not making this up, darling. ‘Well, look, Marie, you’re a queer, right? I mean you’re gay, whatever you want to call it, right? So if you’re gay, what’s with this fuck off routine?’

  “I asked him pleasantly if he ever fucked women. He got deliciously defensive. ‘Do I? What are you, kidding? Listen, I got a wife, I got kids. I get plenty of action. I’m not gay myself. Once in a while, something to change your luck, but I’m no faggot if that’s the question you’re asking me.’

  “‘Well, do you ever make a pass at a woman and get turned down?’

  “‘Listen, Marie or whatever your name is, I make out pretty good.’

  “‘But do you ever get turned down, sugarloaf? That’s what I asked you.’

  “‘Look, nobody’s a hundred percent. Let’s just leave it that I do pretty good.’

  “‘Do you think only women have the right to turn you down?’

  “There was quite a bit more of this before he got the point, which I didn’t think was that elusive a point—that anyone, male or female, had the right to say no to him when approached sexually. He had trouble understanding this. In his lexicon, a queen was supposed to be a sure thing. Even if she said her name was Marie of Roumania, evidently. And of course because I was wasting all this time in conversation with the fool, he thought my no was a yes in disguise and I was just camping it up a bit. I finally told him that he’d better be careful, that maybe we ought to walk around the corner because the fellow across the street was a plainclothesman with the Vice Squad and he seemed to be taking an undue interest in us. So if he wanted to walk along with me . . .

  “He did everything but sprint away from me. And it was too too, really, because the number across the street has been peddling his cute little ass for donkey’s years, and is no more a vice bull than you or I. Or are you a cop, Jack, and is this an elaborate bust? And wouldn’t that be ironic?”

  • • •

  “I have nothing against homosexuals,” the typical enlightened heterosexual will say. “As far as I’m concerned, what two people do by themselves is their own business, so long as they don’t bother young kids or do their act in Macy’s window. But I’ve got to admit that a certain type of faggot rubs me the wrong way. You know the ones I mean. Queens, I guess they’re called, The ones who lisp and mince and make themselves into caricatures of women. Caricatures of homosexuals, even. I agree that they have their rights and I’m not one of these hard-hat types who think they ought to be gassed or locked up. They have a right to live their lives. It’s just a personal thing with me. I get uncomfortable in their company. I don’t like to have them around me. They get on my nerves.”

  I have heard innumerable versions of this little speech over the years, and at one time or another have probably uttered something faintly similar myself. Indeed, I’ve heard essentially the same opinion voiced by overt homosexual males who find the extreme manner of the drag queen off-putting. “They make it difficult for the rest of us,” is a familiar comment.

  Eldon is a perfect example of this type of homosexual. He is very different from Brendan, who acts and reacts very much like a female. Eldon would never be taken for a girl, and his manners are not feminine but effeminate. He is consciously playing a role, but the role is not that of a woman. He is consciously playing the part of a queen, an effeminate homosexual.

  This role occasionally but not always involves full-fledged transvestism, complete with female garb, false breasts, makeup and wig. At other times his face is free of make-up, his hair is his own, and his clothes, while faintly swish, could be worn by any man in the present age of male sartorial splendor. Yet, whether Eldon is in full drag or not, the effect is very much the same.

  He is just under six feet but looks taller because he is so thin. His hair, originally brown (“a classic shade of mouse brown, God help me”) is bleached a somewhat unconvincing blond. He has finely drawn facial features which could be reasonably described as aristocratic. His walk is often a burlesque of a prostitute’s buttock rolling strut.

  It is his manner of speech, unchanging whether he is in male or female attire, which is Eldon’s most obvious characteristic. The specially stressed words and syllables, the extreme inflection, is one of the most striking components of his personality. An accurate rendering of Eldon’s speech would call for the placement of an inordinate number of words in italics. I have tried to keep this to a minimum if only because dialogue presented that way is so annoying to read.

  In addition, Eldon is a surprisingly good mimic. In the passage quoted above, where he describes the attempted pick-up by the John who would not believe he was being rejected, Eldon’s voice dropped a full register and took on all the tones and stresses of the person he was aping.

  When I commented on this talent, he was obviously pleased. I asked if he had done any acting, if he had ever considered any sort of stage career.

  “Acting?” he said, thoughtfully. “No, never. Unless you consider this acting.” His hands moved to indicate himself. “You could say that everything I do is an act, couldn’t you? That all my life is devoted to an imitation of—of whom? Of myself. I spend my entire fucking life developing and perfecting my imitation of me.”

  • • •

  His name is not the one he was given at birth. His original first name was Lyle, his middle name Donald. (“Miss Lyle Donald Thing, if you can bear it. Slightly yecchhh, don’t you think? I always loathed the name Lyle. Way back in grade school. I remember it was in fourth or fifth grade that I took to calling myself L. Donald. I signed everything that way and introduced myself that way. If people called me Lyle I didn’t answer. Unfortunately I didn’t much care for Donald either. Donald was a duck in a cartoon, you know. ‘Donald, duck!’ And then
some ass would heave a snowball at me. Always good for a laugh. So there was a point where I made it L. Don, perhaps inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, that shrewd lunatic who invented scientology. And somewhere along the way L. Don became Eldon, which is a name I simply invented, but since then I’ve discovered that other persons have the name. I’ve read it or heard it here and there. Never met another Eldon. They all seem to be black football players. There was a time when certain intimates called me Donna, but I was never at ease with that. I never entirely saw the point of that, and I usually manage to keep my genders straight, at least in grammatical terms. Though there have been times when I wanted to be a girl. Not just to look like one but to be one, to go and have the operation, but one gets that way now and then when depressed. Nothing serious.”)

  Eldon is twenty-three and has been in New York for the past three and a half years. He had his first homosexual experience at the age of thirteen.

  “I was pretty Nelly before then. I got a certain amount of teasing. Part of having a sissy name more than anything else. I never did anything. There were boys I admired and I may have had crushes on them, but I never made any connection between admiring them and wanting to have sex with them. I didn’t really think much about sex. I didn’t think of anything when I masturbated. I just thought about masturbating, if you follow me, just dwelled on the physical sensations rather than wrapping a blanket of fantasy around it.

  “One afternoon I was hitchhiking. I must have gone somewhere after school and was on my way home. This man—a mature man, but I couldn’t begin to guess his age—he stopped for me and must have known instantly the sort of person I was. I didn’t know myself; but one look and he knew.

  “He drove for awhile. We talked, but I don’t have any memory of the conversation, Then he pulled the car off the road and behind a clump of bushes. No, a billboard. That’s right, because he said something about traffic cops hiding behind billboards, and then he said you could hide a lot of things behind a billboard, and then he grabbed me.

  “‘You’re a little cutie, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Why you’re just like a little girl.’ And then he opened his pants and took his cock out. He had an enormous erection and at that age I had naturally never seen anything like it.

  “‘Okay, sweetie,’ he said, ‘Just look at the lollypop I got for you. Just look at my all-day sucker. You be nice to it or I’ll break your neck.’ And he put his hand on the back of my neck and pinched me, hard. Then he pushed my head down toward his cock.

  “I really didn’t know what to do. He wouldn’t believe that I had never done this before, but he would tell me what to do and all. He wanted me to take it into my mouth to the hilt, which was clearly impossible, and every time I gagged on it he would slap my face or dig his fingers into my ribs.

  “It took him forever to come. A couple of times I asked him if I could stop. ‘You keep going until you finish,’ he said. He shot about a quart in my mouth. I tried to get my head away when he started coming but he had his hand in my hair and wouldn’t let me get away. I got horribly nauseous. He got the door open and virtually threw me out of the car. I landed in the grass on my hands and knees and immediately started vomiting. He called me a dirty fairy bastard and drove away while I was still hunched over throwing up.

  “For a long time afterward I always thought that there was something he sensed about me, something that made it instantly evident that I would do what he wanted me to do. I used to think this but now I’m not so sure. Because he was very forceful, you know, and a boy my age, oh, he probably did this all the time. And probably got away with it virtually all the time. Because there was really nothing I could have done. He was a huge strong son of a bitch and I was a skinny little kid. What could I do? If I had tried to resist he would have hit me for resisting, and sooner or later I would have gotten tired of being hit and I would have sucked him the way he wanted.

  “At least he didn’t want to fuck me. Thank God. At that age, and with his cock as huge as it was, he would have split poor little me in half. He would have cleft me in twain, I surely believe he would.”

  • • •

  Over the following several years, until he graduated from high school and enlisted in the Army, Eldon had homosexual experiences on an increasingly regular basis. None of these experiences were of the sort that served as his introduction to homosexuality. On the contrary, all of his relationships during this interval were with boys his own age, classmates of his at a large suburban high school in the industrial Midwest.

  “There were about a dozen of us, and a choice little covey of quail were we. Shy kids, rotten at sports, vague and dreamy. Generally good at class work but terrible at anything else. I’ve often wondered how many people realized that we were homosexual. Realized that we were doing anything about it, that is. They all knew there was something a little different about us, that we didn’t go out with girls, that we were sensitive types. But I wonder if many of them knew we were having it off with one another.

  “I’m sure we weren’t the sum total of faggotry at that school. I thought we were at the time, but as I compare notes with other dear friends it seems more and more likely that there was a lot more going on than ever I was aware of. Football players shyly playing an inspired game of Drop The Soap in the shower room. And boys who would be best friends, and who would take their friendship a little further than anyone else ever realized. And I’m sure there were boys, who never had anything going at school but who hustled Johns downtown in the evening.

  “In our little group, our little dirty dozen, we all knew who we were. We would speculate about school big-shots the way adult faggots speculate about show business personalities. We were convinced that one of the math teachers was gay, for instance, although none of us had ever had any personal contact with him to reinforce the suspicion. Speculation aside, we stuck with each other. Each of us at one time or another made it with each of the others.

  “It was an odd sort of sex. Very much an adolescent sort of sex. Not that a great many adults don’t swing in a very similar way, but that the whole tone of it had a distinct adolescent quality.

  “The sex was purely sexual. No elements of love. Very much the reverse, actually. We probably felt more friendship with each other than we were willing to express. I can’t specifically recall telling any of those boys that I really liked or admired him, although in many cases I certainly did, and although I suspect I was liked and admired in return, this was never put into words. And no one ever kissed anyone—on the mouth, that is. Or anywhere on the body, really, in the sense of simple kissing. Cocksucking was one thing, purely physical, purely sexual, but kissing implies intimacy of quite another sort.

  “I wonder how thoroughly we identified ourselves as homosexual. I know none of us did much of anything with girls at the time. Some of us dated, but only in a cursory way, never going steady, never getting involved sexually. One of the crowd had gotten his first blow job when he was twelve from a female cousin four or five years older. And another kid who used to deliver prescriptions for a drugstore had one married woman for a customer who used to get him to give her a finger wave whenever he came by. I think she also taught him to muff her. I seem to remember him discoursing at length on the taste and aroma of hair pie. But she never did anything for him. Rather the selfish bitch . . .

  “We did everything to each other, in twos or in larger groups. Is there anything on earth as experimental as a high school boy? If we could think of it we would try it, and we were imaginative little rascals. Jerked each other off, sucked each other’s cocks, fucked each other’s assholes. Worked out elaborate circle jerks and daisy chains. And all in the spirit of good clean fun.

  “You know, it really was fun. And remarkably uncomplicated. From what I’ve read, I gather the English public schools, a good many of them, are little hotbeds of this sort of thing. Of course they complicate it with all that S and M, canings and birchings and other unpleasantries. That part is a bit much. The other, though, is pro
bably very healthy for most of the boys, don’t you think? Because since it’s so universal one can participate without thinking of one’s self as Abbie Abnormal. And afterward those who are so inclined can button up and go straight, and when they think about the good old days it’s in a spirit of boys will be boys and all that.

  “I wonder how many of the old crowd are gay today. I don’t keep up on news from home that closely. I’ve run into a few of the gang who are making the gay scene here in New York, and I get a certain amount of news through that particular grapevine. I know that one of my old friends is married and has presumably put his old life forever behind him. I wonder if his wife knows how he spent his high school years. I wonder how he looks back on them himself. And I wonder, oh, if he’ll stay straight. Or if he’ll fight the good fight for ten or twenty years and then turn up some fine night at one of the bars, looking to find some sweet young thing who will help him recapture his long lost youth.

  “One interesting thing. Our classmates, the ones who were not a part of our circle. Their attitude toward us. If anything, you know, they thought of us as being basically sexless. Because we weren’t playing out the stereotyped male role. We weren’t interested in sports, we weren’t big and tough, we didn’t curse and spit, we didn’t go out with girls, hence we weren’t masculine, hence we weren’t sexual beings. And of course the irony lies in the fact that we were having tons more sex than they dreamed of. I’m positive I had more orgasms per week through homosexual contacts than they had masturbating. And damned few of them so much as lost their virginity during high school, you know, and the ones who did certainly didn’t get laid all that often.

  “We camped it up a little, but we never really queened it. A boy might steal his sister’s bra and do a little number, but that was as far as it went. You could say that we were distinctly homosexual in manner but not genuinely effeminate.”